People in an Organization Behave
Organizational behavior can be defined as the study of how people in an organization behave when faced with various situations or decisions. It is a multi-disciplinary study that often employs scientific research methods to test the pertaining hypotheses.
It draws from behavioral and social sciences and uses the findings to relate the situation to the real outside world. The importance of this study is mainly to boost production, which is often the core business of most production organizations. Through the study, the management gets in a better situation to understand the employees and other people involved in the production process thus it is able to manage them efficiently. It enhances job satisfaction among the employees, allows the management to set attainable goals, and also to expect more realistic values from the production process. It improves the employee relations along the hierarchy of the organization, which also has the effect of increasing output (Schemerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn 2005). Various theories have been advanced by scholars to examine organization behavior so as to aid in human resource management.
The identity work by Erving Goffman views this in various perspectives; for example, impression management view identity as a situation that is often brought about by how people relate to an individual. People in their everyday lives create settings like in a play, perform non-spoken actions, or make an impression on other people by their clothing and what they speak (Goffman 1959).Dramaturgical metaphor is a perspective that deals with how people socialize in an organization. It argues that the way an individual behaves is usually influenced by the time, place, and audience. The theatrical metaphor thus defines the behavior of an individual as based on the norms, culture of the individual, and his expectations.
This theory goes ahead to suggest that the identity of an individual is not stable and independent, it changes with time and place as people interact with other. People portray who they really are, their intentions and personal characters through their actions with the front and backstage behavior. The front stage behaviors can be seen by the audience while the backstage is hidden from anyone else. For instance, a restaurant attendant may appear more casual in the kitchen than before the customers. Performance was viewed under seven elements: belief, mask, dramatic realization, idealization, maintenance of expressive control, miisrepresentation, and deception.
Belief is viewed as a very important part, even though at this stage, the audience may not be in a position to judge the actor. They are not yet certain of the intentions of the character or his behavior, thus they are just able to guess if he is being sincere with his actions or cynical.The mask is a technique that has been standardized; it can be transferred and is often generalized. It is important since it can be employed by the actor so as to alter how the audience views him. Dramatic realization, on the other hand, is a mechanism that the actor uses to relay message to the audience of his aspects he would wish the audience to recognize.
His actions would portray what he intends to be his image before the audience. Idealization is often used to avoid misrepresentation, remove confusion, and give strength to other elements of performance. The audience often has some preliminary idea of how the performance should be. The actor thus goes ahead to do the performance the way the audience expects it to be. Maintenance of expressive control is used to refer to the need of the individual performing his part to always remain in character and not send signals that may be misleading, which would otherwise detract his performance.
